2022/05/02 by Felix F. Wu, Kwangyoun Kim, Wu, Felix +11 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Music and Audio Processing #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.01086
openalex publication_date 2022/05/02 · openalex created_date 2023/02/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce Wav2Seq, the first self-supervised approach to pre-train both parts of encoder-decoder models for speech data. We induce a pseudo language as a compact discrete representation, and formulate a self-supervised pseudo speech recognition task -- transcribing audio inputs into pseudo subword sequences. This process stands on its own, or can be applied as low-cost second-stage pre-training. We experiment with automatic speech recognition (ASR), spoken named entity recognition, and speech-to-text translation. We set new state-of-the-art results for end-to-end spoken named entity recognition, and show consistent improvements on 20 language pairs for speech-to-text translation, even when competing methods use additional text data for training. Finally, on ASR, our approach enables encoder-decoder methods to benefit from pre-training for all parts of the network, and shows comparable performance to highly optimized recent methods.